Author: Meredith Beatty

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Freedom in Devotions

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Pretty soon it will be the new year. And each new year there are new plans and new systems to get your life organized, to become healthier and more productive. This kind of attitude applies to our spiritual lives as well. Many are motivated to ask how they can spend more consistent time with the Lord. How can they finally read through the whole Bible? Now I have no problem with being productive – I love checking off boxes as much as anyone, and spiritually speaking, bearing fruit is a biblical theme – but I sometimes chafe at the systems, the schedules, and the trackers. These things are helpful in prioritizing and organizing, but I also find them to be a hindrance if I’m not careful. How you ask? When they become a straightjacket of duty that defuses delight in God or maybe even an idol that you serve instead of a tool to a greater end.

All Christians should value a personal devotional life, but what that looks like in practice varies from person to person. And it should. One person is a single adult male with a rather predictable schedule every day. He can set up a routine where he spends a certain amount of time every day in Bible reading and prayer. Another person is a young mother of multiple small children. Her days are anything but predictable. She may have to wake up multiple times during the night. She may have very little to no quiet time to herself. Should she expect her devotional life to look like that of the single man? Of course not! That would be silly and almost cruel. It’s also a helpful thought experiment to apply this line of thinking globally. What does it look like for the persecuted Christian in North Korea to have a personal devotional life? What about the family hunkered down in war torn Kiev or the poor single mother in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya? If your expectations of the Christian’s devotional life cannot accommodate these people and their unpredictable situations, those expectations may become a legalistic yoke on the necks of our fellow brothers and sisters. You also may have felt the yoke of expectation resting heavy on your own neck. I know I have.

We’re Not Machines

Teaching on devotional practices has emphasized good things – consistency, reading schedules, prayer lists, and quiet ‘times’ – but maybe we haven’t emphasized them in the context of who we are as human beings: created, dependent, vulnerable, and weak sinners. If we present our systems and schedules as a kind of plug and play scenario without acknowledging our human nature, we make humans out to be little more than machines. Machines can run continuously if given enough energy. They can be programmed to operate on a predictable schedule. But our energy waxes and wanes. Our affections and motivations are muddled. We get sick. We have trouble sleeping. The dishwasher breaks, again. We also don’t acknowledge the reality of the seasons of life. People obviously experience different seasons of life, whether that be the intensity of parenting young children or the stress of caring for older parents. But somehow we don’t think we’re allowed to adjust our expectations for our devotional lives in response to these things.

We don’t do ourselves or others any favors if we expect our days to run seamlessly without interruption. These expectations actually prevent us from experiencing God’s mercy and grace in our weakness. It’s in our honest confession of inability that we enter into the divine strength that is found only in Christ.

We Think We’re Earning

A sneaky thing happens, at least to me, when I start depending on systems and schedules. I begin to believe that my implementation of these things and my accomplishment of the daily tasks earns blessings from God. And if I don’t? Well, I secretly believe I have lost the favor of God. Jerry Bridges talks about this in Chapter 1 of his excellent book, The Discipline of Grace. He calls it the problem of good day/bad day thinking. If we’ve had our ‘quiet time’ that morning and everything has gone pretty smoothly, we think that God is on our side and we can expect his favor. But if we’ve slept through our alarm, yelled at the kids, and ignored the Holy Spirit’s promptings, we believe that we’ve forfeited all chance of being used by him and we wallow in our failure. Bridges explains the problem behind this way of thinking:

Such a reply reveals an all-too-common misconception of the Christian life: the thinking that, although we are saved by grace, we earn or forfeit God’s blessings in our daily lives by our performance.

Bryan Chapell, in his book Holiness by Grace, agrees with Bridges and uses a parable of Jesus to put a sharp point on the subject. In Luke 17:7-10, Jesus tells the story of the unworthy servant who earns nothing from doing his duty, not even a ‘thank you’ from his master. Chapell admits that this parable makes us uncomfortable, but the point is this – our works do not earn us entry into God’s kingdom. He says, “However much we may want – or feel the need – to trophy our good works before God in order to merit his acceptance, our accomplishments remain insufficient to obligate him to care for us as members of his family.”

Chapell goes on to quote Martin Luther’s own struggle with this way of thinking:

I myself have been preaching and cultivating it [the message of grace]…for almost twenty years and still I feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something, so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness.

We Forget the Goal

Once we come to grips with the honest truth that our status with God is completely unearned and freely given to us by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, that may reveal our true motivation in doing all these things. If my true motivation was tied up in a belief that I was earning (or forfeiting) the blessings and favor of God, then I’ve forgotten the goal of devotions in the first place.

But if my status with God has been freely given to me by what Christ has earned in my place, and his merit has been transferred to my account, then I am secure and free to come to God and enjoy communion with him without fear that my performance will affect his love for me. I can decide to use a reading plan or not, I can even quit a reading plan (!) if it is causing me anxiety and stress instead of fostering communion with the Lord. I can decide to spend 10 minutes or 3 hours with God based on my season of life or the way the Spirit is moving in my spirit that day.

This way of speaking about devotions and discipleship may cause some people to be nervous. “Are you saying people don’t have to do devotions? Are you saying that a quiet time isn’t necessary?” Yes and no. You will not earn more favor with God by your works, even the good work of a quiet time. But you won’t grow closer to God without a regular practice of communion with him through Bible reading and prayer. My point here is how we talk and teach about these things. If the conversation isn’t suffused with gospel truth and our practices aren’t driven by grace, then our devotional practice just becomes empty ritual and a striving to justify ourselves.

The goal is God. The way we get to him is by faith in Christ through the power of the Spirit using the Word and prayer. Remember that because of grace, you are free to use whatever other tools you desire, but beware that the tools are just that – tools. They have no power in and of themselves. However you do your devotions, it is the Spirit who gives life. (John 6:63; 2 Cor 3:6) So this new year, pray most of all for the Spirit to fill you and to give you a hunger and thirst for the Lord and his Word that you have never had before.

Sing To the One Who Sings Over You

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Meditation on the Word allows us to slow down and ponder each word and phrase. It allows us to question how each of them flows into the other. Sometimes I do a thought experiment and ponder the opposite meaning of a word or phrase to gain greater insight. For example, instead of, “The Lord is my shepherd…” I will consider how I’m honestly relating to God in the moment and choose a different descriptor. Years ago I was meditating on that phrase and I came up with, “The Lord is my taskmaster…” Ouch. That led to some honest reflection.

Little words often get overlooked but if we change them, they turn out to be very important. Consider Psalm 96:1-2:

Oh sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth!

Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day.

The preposition to is repeated three times. Three times there is a command to sing to the Lord. What if we replaced that with another preposition? Would it change the meaning?

Sing about the Lord.

Sing for the Lord.

I’m not saying these other prepositions don’t express a truth about how we are to praise the Lord. But they do change the meaning. Singing about someone isn’t necessarily personal. It doesn’t require them to be present. Singing for someone can describe a performance. But what about singing to someone?

Because my background includes some professional musical training, any time I am playing my instrument or singing I can fall into the trap of performing for someone. Last night I was at a Christmas event and we were singing carols and worship songs. I found myself worrying about how I sounded to other people and if the harmonies I was singing were correct. But by the end of the night I didn’t care as much and allowed myself to just sing to the Lord. Isn’t he my primary audience?

Zephaniah 3:16-17 is a favorite passage when speaking of singing and God. It says, “On that day [the Day of God’s arrival in the consummation] it shall be said to Jerusalem: ‘Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak. The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”

Let those words and what they communicate about our God dwell richly in your soul. Marinate your heart in them. Our God, the Holy One of Israel, has redeemed us and that redemption is something he sings about! He so delights in his people (see also Psalm 149:4 and Isaiah 62:4-5) that he cannot help but break out in loud praise.

So as you make your through another holiday season and take time to sing carols and hymns and spiritual songs, remember that you are singing to someone. He hears them. He delights in them. And he is singing over you.

What is Hope?

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Oh, blessed is the soul whose hope has a face looking straight out to that day.

What day is Samuel Rutherford speaking of but the Day, the Last Day when Christ will appear and, as John wrote, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2) John goes on to say that this is how we should hope in him.

If I may lean on Rutherford for a definition of hope I would say this – hope is a face looking forward to the last day, the day of his coming and the consummation of all glory. For as Paul explains in Colossians 1:27:

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus this Lord’s Day as we look expectantly and full of hope for the Day of his coming.

Old Commentaries

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Sometimes old books and outdated books get culled from my seminary’s library and end up on a table for anyone to take as their own. A free book is always appealing so I’m always looking over what’s available. The older books don’t always catch your eye. The binding may be tattered and the covers may be completely plain without any design. But this one did catch my eye because of the author, an author I had never heard of until coming to seminary.

This is one of the main benefits of seminary – broadening your learning across the centuries of church history, and exposing yourself to old and new authors. Before beginning my studies, it had been too easy for me to fall into familiar reading patterns, always reaching for Sproul, Piper, and Grudem. But in my first class in seminary I was introduced to someone named C.F.D. Moule. He was an English Anglican priest and scholar who taught for some time at Cambridge. Though he lived most of his life in the 20th century, I had never heard of him. Because of my professor’s mention of him and his work in a class on Paul’s epistles, his name was put on my radar. When I saw this old commentary of his on Colossians and Philemon I grabbed it.

New and shiny and colorful always seems better doesn’t it? Who would rather drive the dingy old car compared to the shiny new one? But outward appearances can be deceiving and a faded cover and broken binding doesn’t mean there isn’t treasure on the pages inside. I had been thinking about Colossians 3:1-4 and union with Christ and thought I would turn to this old commentary to see what Moule had to say about it. I was not disappointed.

Colossians 3:1-4 says this: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

What do these phrases in bold mean? How can I have died but still live? And what does it mean for Christ to be my life? Moule’s comments deserve a much wider reading.

And that death, because it was “with Christ,” in union with Him, was followed of course by life, by resurrection, by part and lot in His own immortal and victorious state as the Risen One; you died, and your life lies hidden, stored, safe-guarded, once placed there, secure for ever, with our Christ in our God. There it lies, and there it lives; and so if you would live it out, using this wonderful life-power for spiritual triumph and service here on earth, you must go evermore to find it there; you must “seek” it; you must “with Him continually dwell,” in steadfast recollection, simplest reliance, and ceaseless secret reception of the divine supply.

Death and life are two animating principles of the Christian life. In this passage we learn that once we place our faith in Christ, a death has occurred, death to the old man, the part of us united to Adam. Life has come, powerful resurrection life because we are now united to the second Adam, to Christ. This is where our life is found, where everything is found. So why go back to that old man to find what we need? It is a broken cistern as Jeremiah says. It is like a parched man going to the Dead Sea for refreshment.

Therefore, in order to live this Christian life, we must constantly go to Christ. It seems simple but oh how often do we default to our own resources! I’ve been meditating on Moule’s words and believe they perfectly describe what it means to abide in Christ: we must steadfastly recollect the facts of what our salvation means – we have died and been raised with Christ; we must simply rely on him and not ourselves; and we must without ceasing drink from the infinite well of his divine supply of grace.

Triumph in Trouble

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Losses and disgraces are the wheels of Christ’s triumphant chariot.

Samuel Rutherford

If God truly works all things together for our good (Rom 8:28) then trouble must be included in all those things. I’ve been reading Rutherford’s letters and have been occupied with the ones he wrote during his own time of trouble while under house arrest for his non-conformity. (You can read more about that here if you’re not familiar.) This morning I read one of the five letters he wrote in one day, June 16, 1637. They are full of sweet submission to the Lord’s purposes and a struggle to express sufficient praise for his glorious and most fair Savior.

Trouble is never something we aim at in this life. No one drives toward the ditches and potholes on the road. But when we find ourselves in the ditch, possibly one of our own making, possibly not, we are impatient to get out. But what if there’s a lesson in that ditch that the Lord wants us to learn? In the next life we will experience eternal rest, but in this life we are promised the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. (See Romans 8:14-17 and Philippians 3:10-11) Rutherford learned to enjoy the ironic, upside down beauty and joy of that fellowship. He didn’t despise the losses or disgraces because he knew his Lord had experienced the same on his behalf. And he was confident that because the Lord had triumphed over death and lives forevermore, he had the authority and power to turn all his losses into joyful gain.

Christ and His cross together are sweet company, and a blessed couple. My prison is my palace, my sorrow is with child of joy, my losses are rich losses, my pain easy pain, my heavy days are holy and happy days.

It’s hard for me to process this when others around me are suffering trouble and loss. What can I do? How can I help? I have experienced a tiny bit of the truth Rutherford is expressing but I can’t make others learn that lesson. And we all know that Romans 8:28, offered without sufficient wisdom and care, can come across as trite and unwelcome for those in deep trial and sorrow. So what to do? How to pray? We may not be able to do anything, and we may not have any eloquent words to pray. But what we can do is come alongside our friends, get in the ditch with them, and not merely offer platitudes from the outside. We may not say anything while in that ditch but our fellowship with them will speak more than words. Didn’t Christ do the same for us?

Lord, help us to love as you do.

When Lovely Means More Than Pretty

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How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!

Psalm 84:1

When you read this verse, do any pictures come to mind? If we think back to the instructions for building the tabernacle, we may picture the fine twined linen, the blue and purple yarns, and cherubim skillfully worked into the curtains (See Exodus 36). Those things were indeed lovely and costly. Gold, silver, and bronze covered various pieces of tabernacle furniture, and the clasps, bars, and frames of its structure. God himself gave two craftsmen, Bezalel and Oholiab, special skill to make all these things. In addition, Moses is instructed to have those filled with skill to make the priests’ garments in such a way that displays beauty and glory (See Exodus 28).

The Lord is certainly beautiful and glorious beyond our comprehension and the place in which he has chosen to dwell – the tabernacle in Israel’s case – is designed to reflect that. I think we would do well to meditate on the beauty of God and how that relates to his glory. If we did, maybe our hearts wouldn’t be so tethered to this world, but rather, filled with eager anticipation for the next.

But when understood in the original language, this word ‘lovely’ points to something beyond outward aesthetics. The word in Hebrew is an adjective meaning well beloved, very dear. The closely related noun form of this word is used 19 times in Song of Solomon to refer to ‘my beloved’.

What makes the dwelling place of God beloved? What makes it very dear? The King of covenant love dwells there! His loyal and steadfast love has opened the door into his presence for those upon whom he has set his special affection. They are his beloved people. And now that we have been brought in, we enjoy and delight in all that our Beloved is for us.

This is why the psalmist expresses his longing for the dwelling place of God with language of yearning and fainting. You don’t respond in this way to a place that is merely pretty to look at. And indeed he goes on to clarify the object and terminus of his affection when he says, “My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.”

I have loved learning Hebrew and am grateful for the tools to dig deeper into the original languages. But one of the challenges of seminary is to take what you are learning in class and have it transform your heart. So we must go beyond the Bible nerd phase of digging for the original meaning of the word ‘lovely’ in Psalm 84. We must go beyond that exciting point of discovery and ask how that piece of information should affect my worship this Sunday and how I go about the rest of my week. For me I think it is beginning to transform how I see the weekly gathering of believers. Have you ever said this, “I didn’t get anything out of the service/sermon today.”? That question may reveal that you are looking at the weekly gathering of believers as a consumer. But what if you and I entered worship with the expectation that we are about to meet our Beloved Lord? That this is a place where he especially dwells with those upon whom he has set his special affection? What if we looked forward all week long to this day of days not as a way to get our spiritual ‘fix’, or to check off a box, but as a day that is set apart to enjoy his presence and cultivate a greater longing for the last Day when he will come back and take us to himself, and all our soul’s longings and faintings will be satisfied?

It’s not the outward, tangible details that make God’s dwelling place so beautiful and glorious. It’s who he is as our King of covenant love. Do you know this King? Are you longing for his return? For when he returns, all will be consummated and he will make his final dwelling place with his beautiful Bride, and all of us will cry, “Glory!”

How Can Clay Win Up to Thee?

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As C.S. Lewis famously said in The Weight of Glory , “We are far too easily pleased.” For all my love of sports, and I’ve spent countless hours since childhood watching men and women strike or throw a ball, tumble across the floor and swing up into the air, run around in circles trying to achieve world records, I think one of the devil’s schemes is to use the good gift of sports to derail our affections, to convince us that the joy and excitement we feel over our team winning, or this person achieving a world record, is the pinnacle of joy and delight.

No. We were made for so much more. We were made to be swallowed up in the enjoyment and praise of our Creator and Savior. But even when we realize the truth of this, and begin to experience a tiny sliver of it here on earth, we can become disappointed because we see how great a chasm there still is between what we experience of Christ’s love and the infinite riches that await. We’ve been given a sip of the glory but our eyes have become opened to the vastness and depth of the great sea of his love. How can we ever reach it? Yes, we were made for so much more, and he is deserving of more than we could ever give him but we are just lumps of clay! This is what I think Samuel Rutherford is getting at in the following quote:

Oh, where is He? O Fairest, where dwellest Thou? O never-enough admired Godhead, how can clay win up [attain] to Thee? How can creatures of yesterday be able to enjoy Thee? Oh, what pain is it, that time and sin should be so many thousand miles betwixt a loved and longed-for Lord and a dwining [pining away] and love-sick soul, who would rather than all the world have lodging with Christ! Oh, let this bit of love of ours, this inch and half-span length of heavenly longing, meet with Thy infinite love! Oh, if the little I have were swallowed up with the infiniteness of that excellency which is in Christ! Oh that we little ones were in at the greatest Lord Jesus! Our wants should soon be swallowed up with His fulness.

Have we settled for stale enjoyments? Have we allowed our God-given capacity for enjoyment and worship and praise to terminate on things that can only be truly and fully satisfied by an infinite Love? This morning I feel my utter lack, the inability to enjoy God and give to him what he deserves. My attention wanders and drifts, settling for lesser loves. The Lord sees and knows this. I thank God for brothers and sisters like Samuel Rutherford who also recognized their own lack. And praise him for his mercy, that he is a compassionate Father who does not condemn us for our lack but continues to call out to his children and say,

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

Isaiah 55:1-2

Presenting Our Bodies

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If you’re a woman of a certain age, born in the 70s, you may have noticed that your social media feed is filled with advice about navigating what used to be called “The Change” aka menopause. It’s a hot topic right now, and I will not apologize for that pun. One click on a Stacey Sims video on YouTube will immediately alert the algorithm to feed you content about protein, lifting heavy, and the use of hormone replacement therapy. As I drive around the Atlanta suburbs, I see more and more people, mostly women, walking around with weighted vests. Get together with your 50 something female friends and the topic will invariably drift toward how to get better sleep or how to avoid putting on those extra pounds.

Women’s bodies go through many changes as we mature, bear children, and then get older. We may feel disoriented and out of control, like our bodies just won’t do what we want them to do, or look the way they used to look. The culture takes advantage of our discontent and, dare I say, hatred of our bodies to sell us things, to deny we’re getting older, to convince us that there’s this one secret to unlock or hack our metabolism and once we find it, then we’ll be like our pre-pregnancy, pre-menopausal selves.

What kind of relationship do you have with your body? Do you hate it? Is it your enemy? Does the number on the scale in the morning determine your self-worth and your mood for the rest of the day? What thoughts run through your mind when you look at yourself in the mirror? Do these questions make you squirm?

I thought I had a pretty healthy self-image until I got cancer. The loss of hair, the loss of body parts, and the sudden onset of menopause exposed the vanity that was always lurking underneath. That idol had been largely hidden and suppressed until my usual ways of managing and controlling my body’s appearance – running, tweaking my diet here and there – no longer worked. I used to joke that I ran so I could eat and that worked until it didn’t.

There are at least two dangers in how we treat our bodies. One is to dissociate from them, believing the lie that they don’t represent the real us. What’s real is what’s on the inside. What’s real is the identity I have constructed apart from my appearance. What’s real is how I feel. The other danger is to make our bodies an idol, the ultimate DIY project. If you have enough money and time, you can buy all the products and invest all your extra time with a personal trainer, nutrition coach, and other wellness experts in order to slow down the inevitable decline.

My pastor recently preached on Romans 12:1-2 which says:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Why does Paul say bodies? Wouldn’t it be more spiritual to say offer your souls? That question reveals a hidden gnosticism, a belief that Christianity has fought for centuries. The gnostics believed that the body was a prison house for the spirit. They looked down on the material world and emphasized the freedom human beings would achieve once they were separated from their bodies. But Christianity pushes back here and teaches the dignity of the whole person – body and soul. The fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and the truths contained in 1 Corinthians 15 point to the goodness of our physical bodies. Paul says in verse 49 of that chapter, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” The man of heaven is Jesus Christ, who lives forever as the God-man. We will receive glorified bodies just like his.

When my pastor preached on offering our bodies as living sacrifices I teared up. I knew that the Lord was putting his finger on something I have been struggling with for a long time. Offer this body? The body I struggle to accept and, if I’m honest, sometimes hate? What would it look like to offer this body to the Lord as a living sacrifice, the body that doesn’t look the way I want, the body ravaged by cancer, the body that doesn’t have the shape it used to? Will I continue to go through life silently resenting it? Or in offering this body to God as a living sacrifice, can I get free of the hatred? Of the near constant fight against it, to make it what I want it to be?

The Lord has given us our bodies. He has crafted them and designed them down to the smallest detail. The incarnation proves that God is not against the body. He loves our bodies. And he has condescended in love to indwell our bodies with his Holy Spirit!

What would it look like if Christian women believed this instead of the lies of the world? What might happen if Christian women started expressing thanksgiving for their bodies instead of contempt? These are questions I want to keep asking.

To Him Who Loves Us

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Revelation scares a lot of people. Both the complexity of the content and the multitude of possible interpretations combine to prevent people from delving into this book. But what if there was an assurance at the very beginning, even in the greeting, that could serve as an anchor as we navigate our way through?

Revelation 1:1-8 is densely packed with information about what kind of book this is and the theology of who it is from. Verse 1 tells us directly that this is “the revelation of Jesus Christ.” The word revelation is apokalypsis in Greek and means to reveal. This kind of literature uses symbols and metaphors to help interpret earthly realities through a heavenly lens. Examples of apocalyptic literature are also found in portions of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, parts of the Old Testament that also confuse us. But verse 4 sounds familiar:

“John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace..”

New Testament letters, or epistles, follow a standard pattern. John is greeting his original readers here, just like Paul does in many of his letters, but things get a little bit extra after this:

…from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.

Every other similar greeting in Paul or the epistles of John mention the Father and the Son. Here we have what may be called a super-sized Trinitarian greeting.

The Father is the one who is and who was and who is to come. This appellation calls to mind the scene in Exodus 3 with Moses at the burning bush, when the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob identifies himself as YHWH, the being one, the ever-living, promise keeping God who covenants with his people and is for his people.

The Spirit is described with this sevenfold symbolism, underlining his fullness and presence with the Father before the throne, proceeding from the Father and the Son and doing his will.

And finally the Son, Jesus Christ, who is described here with three titles which encompass his work on earth and now in heaven. He is the faithful witness, the one who always tells the truth about God. We can trust what he will say in this book. He is also the firstborn from the dead. This doesn’t mean he was created, it means he is the forerunner of the new creation, the preeminent of those who have been resurrected. And then he is the ruler of kings on earth. The original audience of this letter were under threat from the ruler of the Roman Empire. Christians throughout history have also faced opposition from their earthly rulers. But John wants all of us to know that Christ is ruling and reigning – right now!

Why does John expand on the usual greeting? I think he knows what is coming and he knows his audience will need a spiritual ballast, a theological anchor as they hear the words of this book with all its apocalyptic imagery and symbolism. That anchor is the doctrine of God. Who God is in all his Trinitarian glory will strengthen and comfort them as they are called to patiently endure.

If that were not enough to encourage John’s audience and us, he adorns the anchor with praise. After the super-sized greeting chock full of Trinitarian glory and beauty, John’s choice of words should pierce our hearts in the sweetest way. Don’t rush past this!

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Both Paul and Peter broke out in doxology in the middle or at the end of their letters. At the end of 2 Peter, Peter says, “To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity.” In 1 Timothy 1 Paul says, “To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” Both of these would be appropriate ways for John to proceed. Or what about Jude? At the end of Jude he breaks out in praise to God: “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy.” The original hearers of Revelation would definitely be encouraged by those words. But John begins by highlighting the love of God. Is that what you would expect?

To him who ____________ us. How would you fill in that blank? If you were listening to this letter being read for the first time, what would you want to know? What would enable you to endure patiently through this present evil age and on to eternity?

God loves us.

Read that again, but preach it to your soul this time.

Have we become so accustomed to those words that we’ve lost the wonder of them? The gloriously beautiful, all powerful, Sovereign Lord, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, loves us. There’s more to this doxology – blood bought freedom from our sin and union with Christ as a kingdom of priests – but sit back and meditate on the truth John deliberately puts at the beginning.

This book of Revelation tells us the end of the story where God will bring redemptive history to an end and every sin to light. What John’s audience needs to know at the beginning of this letter is that the God who is, and who was, and who is to come soon both to save and to judge, this God, first of all, loves them with an unbreakable covenant love, and that love has brought freedom from sin and a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

I can’t think of a better or more secure anchor.

Run Fast, For It Is Late

Meredith BeattyLeave a comment

I used to run a lot. I was never fast, but I loved pretending I was. I would go to the local high school track and do a workout that involved fast (for me!) short intervals. I enjoyed accelerating around the curve and would pump myself up by imagining I was Allyson Felix in the Olympic 200 meter race. My watch told me the truth that I was actually twice as slow as Allyson, but for that brief moment on the curve, heading into the straightaway and on to the finish of the interval, my imagination helped my legs to turn over quicker.

In letters to his friends and parishioners, Samuel Rutherford often reminded them of the time. Like Paul to the Romans, he emphasized that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” (Romans 13:11) How then shall we live? The Bible uses metaphors to speak of the life of faith. We walk with God (see Galatians 5:16 and Colossians 2:6-7), but we also are called to run (see Galatians 5:7 and Hebrews 12:1-2). In a letter to one of his elders, Rutherford encourages him to run fast, knowing what time it is.

Love heaven; let your heart be on it. Up, up, and visit the new Land and view the fair City, and the white Throne, and the Lamb, the bride’s Husband in His Bridegroom’s clothes, sitting on it. It were time that your soul cast itself, and all your burdens, upon Christ. I beseech you by the wounds of your Redeemer, and by your compearance before Him, and by the salvation of your soul, lose no more time; run fast, for it is late. God hath sworn by Himself, who made the world and time, that time shall be no more (Rev. x. 6). Ye are now upon the very border of the other life.

We don’t know exactly how much time we have left in our short lives. The Lord has determined all our days. And we don’t know how long it will be before Christ returns. But if we woke up this morning we are all one day closer to seeing him. Our life with the Lord is a walk, but as we get closer, as we come around that curve and see the finish line, we can all pick up our knees, and pump our arms, running faster until we cross over to that new Land, our forever home with Christ.